Heaney uses imagery to set the tone of the poem. The opening verse of the poem sets the tone to be very neutral. Heaney says “I sat all morning in the college sick bay/ counting bells knelling classes to a close. At two o` clock our neighbours drove me home”. The opening verse has no emotion of any kind. From this opening verse the reader gets an image of a college student just sitting wondering what is going on. The image makes him seen like a robot, because he is just sitting there showing no emotions, “counting bells” until his neighbours arrive to pick him up. Heaney is just showing the reader the setting and the impassive feeling. The boredom of waiting appears in the “counting of bells” but “Knelling classes to a close” suggests a funeral bell rather than a bell for lessons. The reader may be struck by the neighbours driving him home,/ you start to think why is it not his parents? Did they not have a car or more likely they were too busy at home and relied on their neighbours to help.
The second verse of the poem also makes an impact. “In the porch I met my father crying- He had always taken funerals in his stride- And big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow”. For anyone to see his or her father crying makes the death seem harder. The image of the father crying shows how he is dealing with the death. He was much close to the young boy than the older brother was, because the father had been there with the boy and saw him everyday, making their relationship closer than the relationship between the young boy and his older brother. Heaney uses dashes to give extra information to make the image clearer in the reader’s mind but Heaney has still controlled the information given since we still do not what has exactly happened. But from the information given in this stanza we can sort of guess now, that someone really close to the father must have died since he never usually cried at funerals. “Big Jim Evans” who is probably the family’s close friend’s metaphorically saying “it was a hard blow”. A “hard blow” could have meant that literally the car knocked the young boy very far or the family had a “hard blow” meaning it was very difficult for the family with this tragic death. "
We also see another member of the family who does not know what is going on and is impassive towards the death of his brother. Heaney states, “The baby cooed and laughed and rocked to the pram”. The older brother was away at college and had not seen him in six weeks while the baby was just too young to comprehend what was going on. The baby’s behaviour contrasts with the father’s behaviour. The baby is innocent and does not have a clue about what is going on while the father is crying. Heaney feels embarrassed and uncomfortable when he walks into his house. “When I came in, and I was embarrassed by old men standing up to shake my hand”. The poet is embarrassed as he is being treated like an elder. Usually it is the young people who respect the elders but in this situation it is totally opposite. Another image which helps give the reader the tone of the poem is how the mother is dealing with the death of her son. Heaney states” Away at school, as my mother held my/ hand in hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs”. The mother is trying to be strong and not cry for the sake of her older son. Heaney is telling the reader she is sad by using the imagery in the phrase,” coughed out angry tearless sighs”. You can actually see her coughing and sighing trying to keep her older son from crying. She wants to cry for her child but holds back for the sake of her older son. This is how the mother handles the death. The second last stanza had a lot of impact.
“Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops and candles soothed the bedside”. We get the impression that the older brother could not in fact believe that his brother had died since he had to wait until the next morning until he could see the body. “Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple, he lay in the four foot box as in his cot”. Heaney is just describing how the little boy looked. As the reader you feel that the older brother is finally going to show some emotions. By using the word “soothed” it makes the tone of the poem much more unemotional than the previous stanzas. The reader would expect the older brother to begin crying even lashing out in anger because he has lost his little brother.
In this essay I have discussed how this poem had an impact on me through the poet’s use of devices such as structure, word choice, imagery and sound added to the impact of the poem. The author has shown how death is sudden and can affect people in a different way. Heaney used tone and imagery to show how the family is dealing with the death of their family member. He used these devices to help create an image in the reader’s mind of a sudden and tragic death and how everyone reacts to death differently.
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